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Cologne-Leuven Summer School of Phenomenology 2016 “Genetic Phenomenology”: A Report

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Since 2008 the Cologne-Leuven Summer School for phenomenology has been a hallmark within the landscape of the phenomenological summer schools of philosophy. Moreover, it is the only school which deals specifically with Edmund Husserl, and, as such, it is a must for anybody interested in the founder of the phenomenological movement.

This year’s topic was genetic phenomenology. Related issues, such as pre-predicative experience, the lived body, the relation of phenomenology to psychology, the access to other persons, intersubjective constitution, history, phantasy and the life-world, were also touched upon by a series of presentations carried out by internationally renowned Husserl scholars.

In the morning sessions, professors and post-graduates presented accessible lectures which unraveled particular topics related to Husserl’s thought. The afternoon sessions were devoted to either textual discussions or presentations by graduate students.

Dieter Lohmar (Cologne, Germany): “Static and Genetic Phenomenology”

Dieter Lohmar’s talk during the first day of the summer school focused on the distinction between static and genetic phenomenology. His aim was to show the continuity rather than the discontinuity between these two methods of phenomenological investigation. Lohmar stressed the fact that, thanks to the new critical edition of Ideas II, we can now place the date of the beginning of the genetic phenomenology between 1912 and 1915, i.e. the time when Husserl was working on his drafts of the publication of Ideas II. According to Lohmar, both different topics as well as different methods distinguish genetic from static phenomenology. Static phenomenology takes into account the structure of isolated complex acts, whereas it does not investigate the dynamics of the experiential history, which is rather a characteristic topic for the late genetic phenomenology.

It is possible to mention at least two paradigms or dogmas that broadly characterize static phenomenology. Phenomenology generally starts as an investigation of the essential structures of consciousness. From the point of view of static phenomenology, we can pursue this investigation only by focusing on singular acts (Lohmar baptizes this trait, the “one-act-paradigm” of static phenomenology). Furthermore, static phenomenology relies on the so-called “one-way-foundation-paradigm” related to the general direction of constitutive effects: doing phenomenology, we have to start from the lowest levels of constitution and then work from the bottom up. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl understands the relation between acts primarily in terms of the notion of “foundation” (Fundierung). For instance, the act of feeling is regarded as a complex whole made out of two different acts. The founding act is an act intending a single object: in order to feel something, we need first to have a consciousness of the particular object of our feeling. On the other hand, the founded act is the feeling itself. High level objectivities like states of affair, essences are also grounded on a given cluster of simple acts. From this perspective, however, there is no room for a consideration of the constitutive effects that go the other way around, i.e. from the higher back to the lower levels of constitution. According to Lohmar, the latter is namely more a concern for genetic phenomenology, which focuses on the history of experience and the temporal succession and intertwining of multiple acts.

Diverse topics can be solved or addressed only by going into the genetic history of experience – for instance, the phenomena of language, consciousness, and especially the constitution of experiential “types”.

Types are regarded by Husserl as a product of the process that brings about the sedimentation of experience. They function actively in guiding and determining our perceptual as well as our practical life. Lohmar points out that any sedimented experience does not rest calmly and unknown in an alleged obscure soil, as the metaphor of sedimentation at first glance suggests; rather it influences our further perceptual and practical life. In fact, the term “sedimentation” should not be misunderstood: It does not imply that experiences are simply stocked and rest calm without effecting the life of consciousness; quite the opposite, they determine in a crucial way our experience of the present and likewise our expectations towards the future.

A characteristic example of genetic analysis is given by the experiential, pre-predicative origin of the sense of negation set forth in Experience and Judgment (cf. EU § 21). Husserl’s level of investigation here is well before full-blown cognition, that is, before the sphere of predicative judgment. The sense of negation needing to be addressed in the first place by the genetic phenomenologist belongs to the pre-predicative perceptual dynamics itself. Consider the perception of a tomato. At the beginning, I can just see the front-side of the tomato and notice that it is red. I am therefore motivated to make the experiential judgment that the tomato is red. However, I may afterwards turn the tomato in my hands and see the other side: I then realize that the other side is green. It is still one and the same tomato, but it is an unripe tomato that can no longer be considered fully red: my expectations on the level of perception have been disappointed, or more precisely, my expectation concerning the redness of the tomato was frustrated. This points to the fact that we have usual expectations concerning certain types of objects, but these expectations may undergo a complete or partial delusion. This experience of delusion is illustrated by Husserl with the model of a “fight” (Kampf) between evidences. A kind of evidence is already there before actual perception takes place: It is the evidence of expectation that I already have before I am going to directly perceive the object itself or the currently unperceived side of the object. The evidence of expectation “fights” with the evidence of perception. Yet, after the fight, the looser is still there, i.e. the evidence of anticipation is still alive and forceful, but its force undergoes now a modulation. Thus, a negation of the type “S is not p” is, in Lohmar’s own words, an “historiographic information”. I believed this object be red, but it revealed itself to be green. This information is sedimented in my experience, as “we are historical creatures”: everything that I experience speaks about what I was expecting before and, in this way, it speaks about me, my subjective view and attachment to the world with all its practical expectations, desires, values, etc.

Andrea Staiti’s lecture focused on a further aspect of Husserl’s phenomenological method, namely eidetics. In the first part of his talk, Staiti investigated the notion of essence within Ideas I. Although Ideas offer the first substantial presentation of the notion of essence, anticipations of this method can be found in the Logical Investigations, for instance in the Second Investigation where Husserl introduces the concept of species or in the Sixth Investigation with the reference to the phenomenological structure of categorial intuition. In Ideas I, however, Husserl explicitly puts forth his theory of essences. Staiti noticed that the backdrop of the introduction of essences in Ideas I is “wissenschaftstheoretisch”. Husserl is introducing here a new kind of sciences, the so called Wesenswissenschaften as opposed to the Tatsachenwissenschaften. Essences fundamentally are the object of investigation for the first type of sciences, to which phenomenology also belongs.

In this way, Husserl is contrasting the idea that philosophy should be considered solely as a second order discipline that is a mere appendage of the empirical sciences. According to this view, philosophy does not have a subject matter, but is rather a reflection on the procedure of other sciences. This is the (Neo-Kantian) picture that Husserl precisely seeks to overcome in Ideas I.

The second part of Staiti’s talk dealt with the method of eidetic variation in Experience and Judgment. In this work, Husserl undertakes an analysis of the condition of possibility for experiencing and cognizing generalities. Staiti maintained that generality is already an ingredient of our direct experience of things, not a byproduct of intellectual procedures. We do in fact encounter a sort of generality in experience. However, this kind of generality is not the same generality of concepts or essences. This is a line of thought that goes back to Hermann Lotze, who introduces for the first time the notion of “first generality” (erste Allgemeinheit). Both Lotze and Husserl argue that this generality is grounded in the experience of similarity or syntheses of coincidence (Deckungssynthese): passive syntheses of associations which are at work in every experience without any active engagement or performance (Leistung) on the side of the subject. Anything we experience evokes certain expectations related to a generality called “type”. Types are, thus, a result of the fundamental cumulative aspect of our experience.

Staiti introduced then a fundamental distinction within the realm of generalities between essences, empirical concepts, and types. Empirical concepts, unlike types, do not depend on experience. An empirical concept opens up the extension of the type to infinity. It is not bound to that which I have seen. Differently from essences, however, empirical concepts are tied to the contingency of the world, since the method of attaining them does not get rid of the aspect of contingency and thus bounds the validity of the concept to the existence of the world. In order to purify our concepts, we need a different method, i.e. the method of free variation. This method enables us to discover, as Staiti put it, “what is not negotiable in the properties of an object in order for the object to count as that particular object”. This also means that we do not harvest essences which are already given in perception, but eidetic intuition or experience of essences is a process through which we try to get clear of our cognitive commitments. Staiti ultimately noticed a fundamental difference between type and stereotype. The latter may be characterized in terms of an upshot of the petrification of types. Experiential types, then, are intrinsically fluid and open to change and rectification on the basis of further experience.

Christian Ferentz-FlaTZ’s talk developed in three sections. In the first part, he engaged with the objection concerning the absence of the historical dimension within the Husserlian phenomenology. This absence has been first justified with Husserl’s own critique of historicism in the Logos article of 1911, where Husserl was contraposing its biased method to the radical method of phenomenology based on direct intuition and the grasping of essences. This led many interpreters to consider phenomenology and history as fundamentally incompatible. The transcendental standpoint Husserl develops from the years in Göttingen onwards has also been regarded as a departure from the dimensions of historicity and facticity towards a focusing of the performances of a pure I completely bereft of any content and consequently of history. Furthermore, the eidetic method has been alleged to abstract from the dimension of history due to its prevailing interest on timeless eidetic truths (cf. especially Adorno’s critique of Husserl).

Especially two authors, Lembeck and Landgrebe, sought to provide an answer to this everlasting objection. They both pinpoint to the founding function that phenomenology, due to its eidetic method, can provide with respect to historical sciences.

Heidegger, on the other hand, sets forth with his own conception of phenomenology developed in lectures during the Twenties a new understanding of the relationship between systematic method and historicity. According to him, historicity does not necessarily imply the loss of objective, systematic knowledge. This is possible, however, only by adopting a hermeneutic standpoint, which Heidegger fundamentally misses in Husserl’s own methodology.

In the second part of the talk, Ferentz-Flatz considered a series of sources in which Husserl himself poses the question of historicity and its relationship to the phenomenological method. For example, in a letter to Cornelius from 1906 Husserl draws a distinction that he did not mention in the Logical Investigations: namely, the distinction between causal-explanatory psychology (kausal-erklärende Psychologie) and genetic psychology. The first type of psychology provides causal explanations by making reference to transcendent causes, whereby the second type opens up the possibility of a genetic consideration of experience which is not based upon external causation. Thus, Ferentz-Flatz concludes that a new concept of genesis begins to take hold in Husserl already during the 1910s.

The very breakthrough of the genetic phenomenology is however firstly documented in the appendix XLV of Husserliana XIII, which is dated 1916-17. Here Husserl provides four different meanings of the term “originality” (Ursprünglichkeit): 1) original givenness as opposed to indirect givenness, 2) founding as opposed to founded, 3) prior as opposed to posterior (temporal succession), 4) unmodified as opposed to modified (reproductive modification).

In Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Husserl will apply the genetic method in order to clarify the origin of judgments. This implies the consideration of the history of sense (Sinngeschichte) that pertains to each judgment as such as well as to each form of judgment. Further, Experience and Judgment (1939) purports to follow a similar undertaking, whereby the Cartesian Meditations contain a treatment of the experience of others that does not completely get rid of genetic explanations. Especially in this case, as Ferentz-Flatz underlined, Husserl makes a methodical use of the concept of genesis: he simulates a “fictive genesis” in order to discover new layers of experience – as when in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation one is requested to abstract from others and from any intentional implication that refers to others in order to discover a primordial sphere from which to begin the phenomenological analyses of the intersubjective experience. In this sense, a parallelism between genetic phenomenology and developmental psychology becomes evident. This is, however, only a parallelism, Ferentz-Flatz points out, since psychology has to do with empirical laws of the succession of stages of development, whereas phenomenology is concerned with eidetic laws of succession that strive for being universally valid.

The third and last section of Ferentz-Flatz‘s talk was devoted to a clarification of the third appendix of Husserl’s Crisis. His reading of the Husserlian reconstruction of the origin of geometry points to the fact that we are confronting here not a historical investigation devoted to rendering the objective truth about how things really happened. On the contrary, Husserl is here rather keen to show how things should have developed, how geometry should be born of conscious accomplishments. Genesis in this sense does not refer to the factual, objective history. As Rudolf Bernet points out in his preface to the German edition of the introduction to Husserl’s appendix written by Derrida, the history of consciousness has nothing to do with the factual history.

Emanuele Caminada (Cologne, Germany): “Lebenswelt in Ideen II”

Emanuele Caminada tackled the problem of tracing the historical genesis of the problem of the lifeworld in Husserl from Ideas II onward as well as engaged with its late systematic account in Husserl’s philosophy. At the core of Husserl’s idea there is the constitutive function of attitudes (Einstellungen). In Ideas II, Husserl distinguishes between the phenomenological attitude, the naïve attitude, the naturalistic attitude, the personalistic attitude, and the so called “geisteswissenschaftliche Einstellung”, i.e. the attitude proper to the humanities. Caminada characterized the notion of attitude in general as a form of perspectivity, a habit, a mindset.

Phenomenology defines itself in the first place as an attitude, namely the phenomenological attitude. In order to perform phenomenological analyses, one is required to adopt a new attitude that allow her to grasp phenomena in their richness beyond any scientific bias and prejudices. The natural attitude and the naturalistic are, according to Caminada, “absolute attitudes”: they provide us with a complete vision of the world. On the other hand, the attitude of the humanities and the personalistic attitude are attentive to the role that the fundamental correlation between subject and the world plays in every experience; these latter two are thus more committed to a form of relativism.

The phenomenological attitude can help us to distinguish the different attitudes, that is, it makes us sensitive towards the grasping of changes between attitudes. In fact, the phenomenological task is not only to pursue a classification of the different attitudes, but to investigate the correlation and transition from one attitude to another, as well as the way they interplay in concrete experience.

Jagna Brudzinska delves into the much debated question of the relation between phenomenology and psychology. Phenomenology characterizes itself as a descriptive science of experience and, under this perspective, it shares the descriptive character of its method with psychology. However, unlike empirical psychology phenomenology deals with eidetic laws and truths concerning the essential structures of experience. Its method is therefore not deductive and empirical, as in the case of psychology. Brudzisnka underlined further that one of Husserl’s main goals was to lay the foundations for a new kind of psychology as an a priori discipline. In this sense, one can speak of a parallel development of phenomenology and a pure, a priori psychology in Husserl’s thinking. The difference between the two derives from the transcendental character of the former, i.e. its attempt to unravel the constitution of being by the transcendental subject.

A topic further addressed by Brudzinska’s talk was the character of motivation as opposed to proper causation. According to her, it is important not to conflate motivation with a weak form of causality, as the former has a totally different structure of relation with respect to the latter.

The genetic turn in Husserl’s phenomenology means a turning point in the analysis of the life of consciousness. If in static phenomenology the singular act was the primary focus of the phenomenological investigation, with total abstraction from the temporal dimension of experience, genetic phenomenology instead points at illustrating the meaningful connections that join experiences together. One of these connections is the temporal succession which is far from being a mere “one-after-the-other” (Nacheinander), but which is more better described as a “one-upon-the-other” (Aufeinander) or “one-in-the-other” (Ineinander) relationship. Thus, there is a dynamic structure underlying the succession of experiences; one that cannot be seized upon by static phenomenology alone. The genetic method permits precisely the singling out of this structure and makes it the object of a phenomenological, a priori analysis.

In his second talk, Lohmar tackled the topic of pre-predicative experience in the late Husserl by introducing a number of examples from everyday life. Pre-predicative experience is a knowledge each individual has about the properties and practical usefulness of determinate objects. This knowledge is not propositional; ratherit is founded in the past experiences the subject has of this or that object. Furthermore, the way that this specific kind of knowledge appears in phenomenological terms is a phantasmatic anticipation of the distinctive characteristics that individuate an object as that particular object. This phantasmatic anticipation is a form of evidence that Lohmar contrasts to impressive evidence. In the case of disappointment, a pre-predicative experience Husserl poses as the basis of the predicative form of negation, anticipative and impressive evidences clash together giving rise to a conflict of evidences in which impressive evidence usually has the upper hand.

According to Lohmar, pre-predicative experience functions primarily in an unconscious way. Whether the subject can find out what she already knew in advance depends on the particular situation in which she finds herself, and it is pre-predicatively functioning by shaping her experience of a determinate object and of the world in general. Methodically, we need to make a conscious repetition of the situation, and then we may gain insight into the knowledge and pieces of information that were operative in it.

Lohmar emphasized once more the fact that we have an historiographic knowledge of past experiences. Our present situation is informed by what we have lived in the past. This holds true also for predicative formations like negation, addition, and subject-object predication. They all have their origin in experience or, more specifically, in the history of experience. This is the main idea Husserl advocates, for instance, in Formal and Transcendental Logic, in which he argues that logic needs a theory of experience in order to become understandable and justified from a phenomenological perspective.

Sebastian Luft (Marquette University, USA/Padeborn, Germany): “Husserl’s Mature Phenomenology of the Life-World and His Critique of the Sciences”

Sebastian Luft offered a survey of Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world from its beginnings in Ideas II to its extensive development in the Crisis-work. Husserl envisioned the task of describing the intuitive lifeworld in its concrete typicality especially in the lecture on Nature and Spirit from 1919. In Ideas I (1913), this project is not yet fully developed, although one can find there a description of the natural attitude, i.e. the way in which human beings naturally live and are conscious of a world that is intuitively given in experience. Therefore, Luft argues that the theme of the life-world was introduced in 1913 whereas the concept only in 1919. The first time both the theme and the concept were set forth in a published work was in the first volume of the Crisis in 1936. For this reason, the theme of the life-world was usually understood as a result of Heidegger’s influence on Husserl’s later work. This is, however, far from being true, as the unpublished Husserl’s reflections on this particular topic from the 1910s and 1920s unmistakably prove.

Luft discussed the concept of the natural attitude as the horizon within which the theme of the life-world gradually emerged in Husserl’s thought. The natural attitude is the normal attitude underpinning our everyday activities and opinions. Most importantly, we do not know that we are in the natural attitude as long as we are in it. The main thesis of the natural attitude is that the world exists and more precisely does so independently of any experiencing consciousness. Thus, according to Luft the correlation between the subject and the object of experience remains absolutely concealed in the natural attitude. Only phenomenology and its proper methodology can reveal that everything objectively existent is the correlate of a subjective “doing”. In this sense, science is deemed to be a specific doing guided by the intention of gaining objective (subject-independent) knowledge. This doing is further characterized by a proper form of attitude that Husserl calls “naturalistic attitude,” which distinguishes itself from the natural attitude through the epistemological goal informing its activity. This primarily consists in the task of de-perspectivizing the perspectival view on the world proper to the natural attitude and achieving thereby a “view from nowhere”. The world of the natural attitude is therefore prior to science and to the naturalistic world that is a product of the objectivizing and de-perspectivizing standpoint the natural sciences assume with respect to the given, intuitive world.

The world of the natural attitude, which Husserl lately baptizes as the life-world, is not a pre-linguistic world, but rather a world of opinions, musings, projects, and interests. Luft provided the following definition of the life-world: “The life-world is the product of constitution on the part of transcendental subjectivity, living in the mode of the natural attitude”.

In the Crisis Husserl explicitly carries out the project of a phenomenological description of the a priori of the life-world as it is given to us prior to science. This world is eminently a social world, and the naturalistic attitude of the positive sciences has concealed this fundamental worldly dimension by identifying the world with (material) nature. Hence, Husserl’s project amounts to the attempt to develop a science of the “despised doxa”, i.e. of the subjective-relative that characterizes the natural attitude and the experience within the original dimension of the life-world. This experience is at the same time the starting point of every scientific endeavor, and the life-world can thus lay the “meaning-foundation” of and for every kind of science. Sciences “cover up” the life-world with a “shroud of ideas” and take the result of this operation, which is the world according to the science, as the real world while relegating the life-world to an illusion. But this is the reverse of the truth, according to Husserl. Science reverses the natural order of things or, to put it in Cassirer’s terms, science is the one symbolic form of meaning that has become the measure of all others. This position characterizes the so-called naturalistic reductionism against which Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world wants to take over. This implies the development of a new science able to describe and to conceptually fix the structure of a world that is most known and familiar to us, and in that way most distant. This world contains a material a priori structure – spatially, temporally, and genetically. A science of the life-world, Luft finally remarked, is precisely a transcendental science of the subjective, i.e. of the conditions of the possibility for the subjective access to the world.

Alice Pugliese provided in her talk an overview of Husserl’s understanding of intersubjectivity. In particular, she questioned the method through which Husserl intended to illustrate the experience of the other in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. In this work, the analysis carried out by Husserl boosts a static account of intersubjectivity in which the individualities of the encountering subjects are already constituted and pre-given. Pugliese argues that this is certainly one aspect of the intersubjective encounter, but it does not exhaust all of the dimensions and facets in which intersubjectivity may appear. The face-to-face encounter that Husserl has in mind in describing intersubjectivity within the Fifth Meditation presupposes that each person has already a history of experiences that constitute her individuality and make her a full-blown subject. There may be, however, encounters with subjects at different levels of genetic development, for instance the relation between the mother and child, which has also been object of scrutiny in Husserl’s posthumously published manuscripts. According to Pugliese, it is precisely the static account characterizing Husserl’s most known theory of intersubjectivity that poses the problem of the accessibility of the other’s consciousness life. In this view, the subjects are mutually inaccessible, they are opaque to each other. This depends, at least partly, on the fact that the already constituted subjects do not share the same experiential history. This represents, however, both a term of differentiation as well as a term of continuity between the subjects. In fact, Pugliese stressed that the individuation of the subject through a lived history means that they are profoundly different, but this is at the same time the basis for their mutual recognition. A single experience is by definition not sharable; and, therefore, the other is given to me in this regard in the mode of the accessible inaccessibility. Yet, if one puts the single experience in the web of a continuous flow of experiences, the identification with the other subject can take place, since we both share the structure of a meaningful life spreading over a number of different, successive experiences. This general structure is what links us together and gives evidence of our commonality, which is then the basis for the mutual recognition of the other as a subject like me, that is as an alter ego.

Pugliese continued by saying that a specific kind of individuation takes place in the experience of the other. There is a process that Husserl labeled with the term “communalization” (Vergemeinschaftung) that means the process of becoming subjects within a given community of other subjects – what the sociologists nowadays probably would call “socialization”. Through this process of becoming intersubjectively recognized by other subjects, everyone achieves a characteristic individuation as a social subject. Everyone becomes an individual for a community and thus identifies herself with specific social roles and values.

Saulius Geniusas (Hong Kong, China): “Phantasy in Late Phenomenology”

Saulius Geniusas undertook a discussion of Husserl’s phenomenology of phantasy. He focused in particular on the question about productive imagination and sought to answer this on the basis of Husserl’s reflections on the phenomenon of phantasy. The issue regarding productive imagination is a critical one and concerns the alleged absence of a treatment of this phenomenon within the Husserlian phenomenology. According to Geniusas, this represents a bias of post-Husserlian phenomenologists, according to whom Husserl ultimately never recognizes productive imagination as a proper object of investigation. Geniusas’ talk provided an argument against this bias.

The talk was divided into four sections. First, Geniusas elucidated the meaning of the concept of “reproductive phantasy”, with which Husserlian phenomenology is particularly concerned. According to a widespread view, the reproductive character of phantasy derives from the fact that it replicates copies of actual objects given in actual experience. This however does not exhaust the meaning of the reproductive character in phantasy experiences. In addition to this Geniusas identifies two other forms of phantasy reproduction: namely, the reproduction of the experience (Erfahrung), e.g. the act of seeing Peter, and the reproduction of experiencing (Erlebnis), e.g. the act of seeing as such without its intentional object. This should allow us to draw a distinction between memory, as a reproduction of experience in the first sense, and phantasy, which has the freedom to reproduce the act of experiencing in isolation from the object of experience.

Second, Geniusas tackled the question of whether phantasy can be regarded as an immanent component of perception. With the help of the example of cross-modal illusions, he showed how the transfigurative function of phantasy does not go smoothly together with the fundamental capacity of perception for presentingthe given in its own pure givenness. Hence, phantasy cannot be taken to be an ingredient of the perceptual experience. This does not mean, however, that phantasy is completely disconnected from perception. As Geniusas pinpoints, in fact, the function of phantasy in perception has to be found on the objective side of the experience, i.e. in the internal and external horizon that surrounds the object as perceived. Every perception is, according to Husserl, an apperception. This entails that the perception of the front side of an object is always at the same time accompanied by the givenness of the back side and of the other objects that physically surround the first object. In this sense, Geniusas sees a function of phantasy in providing an experience of these horizons of the objects that cannot be grasped in immediate perception.

Third, Geniusas discussed three fundamental senses on which one can speak of productive phantasy in the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the first place, productive phantasy may be intended as referring to the capacity to intend original fictive objects, such as centaurs, round squares, etc. Secondly, productive phantasy is associated with the activity of opening up the field of pure possibilities. This sense is employed by Husserl in his discussion of the eidetic method and the function of phantasy as one of its pre-conditions. Ultimately, productive phantasy intends configurations of sense in the sphere of inactuality with the practical purpose of transferring them into the sphere of actuality. This latter sense has been then the topic of the last part of Geniusas’ talk.

In the fourth section, Geniusas argued for an understanding of the constitution of the cultural world in terms of a product of phantasy. His argument began with addressing the question of meaning that is at the core of Husserl’s philosophical enterprise. Namely, all philosophical questions represent for Husserl questions of meaning. The actual reality, and in particular the reality of the cultural world, is in this view also a particular configuration of meaning. The problem of constituting a cultural world equals, therefore, the problem of constituting a new sphere of meaning that is shared by a plurality of subjects. The main question here amounts to asking how a subject can participate in and gain access to a particular cultural world. A first answer would be simply communication: the subject apprehends the culture in question through communication with the ones who belong to that particular cultural world. This, however, begs the initial question according to Geniusas. Communication does not make me intuitively present the sense that is communicated; rather, it points towards this sense and its correlative intuition. An empty intention of the sense and meaning contained in a cultural practice does not allow the actor to fully understand what she is doing while performing this or that practice. There must be an intuitive access to the content of sense conveyed by the cultural practice. Now, the question turns out to be, what kind of experience can provide us with an intuitive access to this content? Geniusas’ answer is that only phantasy can and must play a role here by furnishing an intuitive experience of a sense that would otherwise be inaccessible and concealed.

Lohmar’s last talk addressed the issue of Husserl’s foundation of sciences. Hereby, one intends three kinds of scientific inquiry: humanities, formal sciences (like mathematics and logic), and natural sciences. Husserl attempted, on the one hand, to provide a critique of those sciences as they are historically handed down by the Western tradition and, on the other hand, to found them on the basis of a phenomenological investigation into their a priori conditions. Probably taking up a concern which Dilthey expresse before him, Husserl especially aimed at establishing a foundation of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), and this is attested by a series of lectures he gave in 1913, 1915, 1919, and 1927 that bear the title “Natur und Geist” as well as the lectures on Phenomenological Psychology from 1925 and, ultimately, the Crisis (1936). Ideen II (1912-15) is also informed by this project, since is displays analyses concerning the intersubjective constitution of cultural sense as well as a consideration of the development of habitual, spiritual meaning and the “teleological” dynamics of sinking-down and re-actualization of cultural formations.

In the discussion of the constitution of a cultural world, the body (Leib) plays a prominent role. This is so, according to Lohmar, because the communication between subjects takes place first and foremost at a bodily level rather than a merely linguistic one. There is a huge number of conversational patterns that are possible and are actually performed only through body movements and behaviors. The body is an organ of communication and also is the principal path allowing us to discover the other as another subjectivity like us, as the well-known analyses of the experience of the other in the Cartesian Meditations suggest. The activity of interpreting or re-enacting (Nachvollziehen) in one’s mind what the other thinks, feels and judges relies on the direct experience of the other’s body in analogy with our own.

In the Crisis Husserl pinpoints the role played by the evidences of the life-world in laying the foundation for the natural sciences. He shows how everyday evidences supervise and ultimately render possible every step of the scientific inquiry, starting from the bare handling with experiment devices to the communication of scientific results within a community of trusted co-researchers.

Reviewed by: Marco Cavallaro (PhD Fellow at a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne; Department Member of the Husserl-Archive Cologne; Visiting Researcher at Boston College)